Where Democrats Can Find New Voters

A worker at an Amazon fulfillment center in Lebanon, Tenn. These types of service jobs have replaced manufacturing jobs in the U.S.CreditCreditMark Humphrey/Associated Press

The relentless focus on the white working class in the aftermath of the election of President Trump has overshadowed a much larger bloc of voters, the roughly 65 million service sector workers whose partisan loyalty is up for grabs.

This immense and diverse employment sector is set to become a battleground in the struggle between Democrats and Republicans.

While the term "service sector" has become somewhat pejorative, with its ambience of lousy locally-traded food-service and maintenance jobs

it also includes

research services, education services, and professional services like consulting.

Muro sees potential for Democratic Party growth in the service sector, arguing that

the ongoing "servitization” of the economy is a big trend and it likely will benefit the Democratic Party for years to come.

Since 1974, the total number of private sector employees in service-providing industries has grown from 40.3 million to 103.8 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Manufacturing jobs moved in the opposite direction, falling from 18.2 million in 1974 to 12.4 million.

Richard Florida, the director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, has conducted some of the most detailed analyses of employment sectors.

Best known for his work on the emergence of the so-called knowledge or creative class, Florida has turned his attention to less well-paid service jobs that do not require college or postgraduate degrees, focusing on the voting patterns of such workers in this nation’s 382 metropolitan areas.

Standing between the working and creative classes are low-paid service workers. Florida places better paid service workers who are technically in the service class — lawyers, teachers, social workers, many high tech digital employees — into the creative class.

With this more restrictive definition, Florida notes, service workers are still

the largest class with 65 million workers, about 45 percent of the work force. Low wage routine jobs in food prep retail, office work, personal and health services. Majority women, multiracial, multiethnic.

How do they vote? Florida finds that this population currently splits its vote evenly between the two parties — “no statistical significance for either Trump or Clinton.” According to Florida, for Democrats, to keep “bemoaning the loss of the white working class may be a big mistake.”

Florida argues that low-paid service workers are the population that Democrats need to mobilize. He suggests a far more targeted approach:

Not working class places. The way to do this is with an aggressive inclusive growth agenda: upgrade service jobs, higher geographically-indexed minimum wage, better labor laws to protect service and caring work and jobs, universal basic income, affordable housing. I could go on. This is the new winning cross-class, geographic coalition.

Patrick Adler, a doctoral candidate in urban planning at U.C.L.A. who collaborated with Florida on this research, does not disagree, but has some caveats. He sent me data he compiled that suggests that low-paid service workers are by no means guaranteed to become loyal Democrats. Much depends on ethnic and other demographic characteristics.

Adler’s data shows that the strongest Clinton metro areas were 49.8 percent Latino, while Trump’s best metros were 8.7 percent Latino. Clinton metros had four times the percentage of foreign-born voters (at 20 percent) as Trump’s (at 5 percent).

“What stands out to me,” Adler wrote,

is that solidly Clinton service metros tend to be immigrant gateways like Miami, McAllen and Orlando, while solidly Trump service metros tend to be highly segregated (i.e., black/white segregated) Southern places.

The demographics of the pro-Clinton metros point to additional problems facing Democrats who seek to build support among service workers. The high levels of immigrant, Latino and foreign-born voters in these communities means that it is more challenging to register and turn them out.

Democrats, however, know that they need to get more votes from workers without college degrees, and that their best opportunity to do so is among service workers.

For example, 77 percent of the 5.8 million employed in personal care and service occupations are women; 72 percent of the 17.7 million people working in office and administrative support occupations are women; and 75.6 percent of the 8.9 million in health care occupations.

Democratic operatives and union organizers are starting to mobilize lower-paid service workers in preparation for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential elections. The Service Workers International Union is gearing up for a major political and union organizing campaign in the Midwest.

The SEIU is the nation’s second-largest union and one of the most politically active. It has been a driving force in the minimum wage “Fight For $15.” The union has organized such low-wage employees as janitors, protective service workers, home-care workers and airport workers. It is trying to put itself into a position where it can register and turn out workers in such areas as fast food employees, warehouse and fulfillment center workers and hospitals.

Union officials estimate that there are 64 million workers across the country who make less than $15 an hour.

“Only half are registered, and only half of them voted. 48 million of them did not vote in 2016,” one union leader, who asked not to be identified so that he could be forthright, told me. A big problem last year, he said, was that

Hillary Clinton didn’t inspire anyone. Why the hell stand in line if it’s just to vote for more of the same?

Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and strategist, wrote me by email to say that he thinks Florida’s analysis “is very smart.” Greenberg, like many pollsters, had been broadly categorizing voters without college degrees as working class, but recently he has begun to change the practice:

For the first time, we are asking occupation to try to get at this — and so, I think there really is potential for Democrats to gain here. This is a real insight into what is possible.

Paul Booth, who recently retired as executive assistant to Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, noted that service workers have been crucial to the survival of the union movement. For decades, trade unions have provided crucial money and manpower to the Democratic Party. In an email, Booth wrote me:

Service industries are where the growth strategies of organized labor have been mostly focused for 40 years, and where most of the growth has occurred. While union membership has stagnated on the bottom line at around 16 million over that span, the composition of the 16 million changed dramatically, millions of health care, personal service, education and government workers (and some retail) joining, while roughly the same number in other sectors “leaving.”

Republican leaders, Booth argues, are fully aware of the dangers of an organized and politically mobilized service sector. “The effort to strangle this opportunity has been the top strategic priority of the GOP” since it gained power in the 2010 midterm elections, he contended. These efforts include state right-to-work legislation, ending automatic deduction of union dues, severe restrictions on the issues permitted at the bargaining table, and other restraints on organized labor.

Booth notes that in 2014, Democrats and unions successfully backed ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage in three red states, Alaska, Arkansas and South Dakota, “but little or none of the support spilled over to help Mark Pryor, Mark Begich and Rick Weiland,” the losing Democratic Senate candidates in those states.

One key obstacle for Democrats seeking to recruit service workers is that such a mobilization would require stronger class appeals and less emphasis on identity politics than party leaders have been prepared to make.

If, as my SEIU source says, “politics doesn’t answer people’s problems,” then you are “not going to get majorities willing to get into the fight.”

Internal pressure within the Democratic Party to move to a more populist economic stance has been building in the aftermath of the devastating losses on Nov. 8 under Clinton’s cautiously centrist presidential bid.

Similar tension has been a constant source of intraparty conflict dating back nearly 50 years to the 1968 presidential primary battle between Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy.

The conflict will not be resolved by November 2018. But the ideas suggested by Richard Florida are a start. Nothing instills the drive to adopt successful strategies like the anguish of defeat and the relegation to minority status.

The low-paid, low-turnout service sector offers the Democratic Party the potential to go beyond their coastal deadlock and break into Republican-leaning districts where white working-class voters have dominated close elections.

Looking forward, the Democrats would appear to have the wind in their sails. The anti-Trump movement is flourishing at a local level in congressional districts across the country. Voter turnout in the Tuesday gubernatorial primaries in Virginia reflects this enthusiasm: 542,607 ballots cast in the Democratic primary; 366,248 in the Republican.

The Trump presidency has revived Democratic enthusiasm and may permit an elision of center-left divisions through the midterms. Enthusiasm, however, has a short half-life — look at the conservative shift reflected in the 1978 and 1980 post-Watergate elections and the swift collapse of the Occupy movement at the beginning of this decade. The danger of Democratic dependence on Trump as a motivator, however, is that underlying resource-allocation conflicts — racial, ethnic and economic — are likely to worsen the longer they are denied and neglected.

Correction:June 15, 2017

An earlier version of this column misstated the name of the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees when Paul Booth, an executive assistant for the organization, retired; it was Lee Saunders, the current president, not Gerald McEntee, a former one, for whom Mr. Booth also worked earlier in his career.